Transport Area Working Group B. Briscoe, Ed.
Internet-Draft Simula Research Lab
Intended status: Informational K. De Schepper
Expires: October 1, 2017 Nokia Bell Labs
M. Bagnulo Braun
Universidad Carlos III de Madrid
March 30, 2017
Low Latency, Low Loss, Scalable Throughput (L4S) Internet Service:
Architecture
draft-briscoe-tsvwg-l4s-arch-02
Abstract
This document describes the L4S architecture for the provision of a
new service that the Internet could provide to eventually replace
best efforts for all traffic: Low Latency, Low Loss, Scalable
throughput (L4S). It is becoming common for _all_ (or most)
applications being run by a user at any one time to require low
latency. However, the only solution the IETF can offer for ultra-low
queuing delay is Diffserv, which only favours a minority of packets
at the expense of others. In extensive testing the new L4S service
keeps average queuing delay under a millisecond for _all_
applications even under very heavy load, without sacrificing
utilization; and it keeps congestion loss to zero. It is becoming
widely recognized that adding more access capacity gives diminishing
returns, because latency is becoming the critical problem. Even with
a high capacity broadband access, the reduced latency of L4S
remarkably and consistently improves performance under load for
applications such as interactive video, conversational video, voice,
Web, gaming, instant messaging, remote desktop and cloud-based apps
(even when all being used at once over the same access link). The
insight is that the root cause of queuing delay is in TCP, not in the
queue. By fixing the sending TCP (and other transports) queuing
latency becomes so much better than today that operators will want to
deploy the network part of L4S to enable new products and services.
Further, the network part is simple to deploy - incrementally with
zero-config. Both parts, sender and network, ensure coexistence with
other legacy traffic. At the same time L4S solves the long-
recognized problem with the future scalability of TCP throughput.
This document describes the L4S architecture, briefly describing the
different components and how the work together to provide the
aforementioned enhanced Internet service.
Briscoe, et al. Expires October 1, 2017 [Page 1]
Internet-Draft L4S Architecture March 2017
Status of This Memo
This Internet-Draft is submitted in full conformance with the
provisions of BCP 78 and BCP 79.
Internet-Drafts are working documents of the Internet Engineering
Task Force (IETF). Note that other groups may also distribute
working documents as Internet-Drafts. The list of current Internet-
Drafts is at http://datatracker.ietf.org/drafts/current/.
Internet-Drafts are draft documents valid for a maximum of six months
and may be updated, replaced, or obsoleted by other documents at any
time. It is inappropriate to use Internet-Drafts as reference
material or to cite them other than as "work in progress."
This Internet-Draft will expire on October 1, 2017.
Copyright Notice
Copyright (c) 2017 IETF Trust and the persons identified as the
document authors. All rights reserved.
This document is subject to BCP 78 and the IETF Trust's Legal
Provisions Relating to IETF Documents
(http://trustee.ietf.org/license-info) in effect on the date of
publication of this document. Please review these documents
carefully, as they describe your rights and restrictions with respect
to this document. Code Components extracted from this document must
include Simplified BSD License text as described in Section 4.e of
the Trust Legal Provisions and are provided without warranty as
described in the Simplified BSD License.
Table of Contents
1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
2. L4S architecture overview . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
3. Terminology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
4. L4S architecture components . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
5. Rationale . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
5.1. Why These Primary Components? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
5.2. Why Not Alternative Approaches? . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
6. Applicability . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
6.1. Use Cases . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
6.2. Deployment Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
6.2.1. Deployment Topology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
6.2.2. Deployment Sequences . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
6.2.3. L4S Flow but Non-L4S Bottleneck . . . . . . . . . . . 18
6.2.4. Other Potential Deployment Issues . . . . . . . . . . 19
Briscoe, et al. Expires October 1, 2017 [Page 2]
Internet-Draft L4S Architecture March 2017
7. IANA Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
8. Security Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
8.1. Traffic (Non-)Policing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
8.2. 'Latency Friendliness' . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20
8.3. Policing Prioritized L4S Bandwidth . . . . . . . . . . . 20
8.4. ECN Integrity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
9. Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22
10. References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22
10.1. Normative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22
10.2. Informative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22
Appendix A. Required features for scalable transport protocols
to be safely deployable in the Internet (a.k.a. TCP
Prague requirements) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26
Appendix B. Standardization items . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30
Authors' Addresses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33
1. Introduction
It is increasingly common for _all_ of a user's applications at any
one time to require low delay: interactive Web, Web services, voice,
conversational video, interactive video, instant messaging, online
gaming, remote desktop and cloud-based applications. In the last
decade or so, much has been done to reduce propagation delay by
placing caches or servers closer to users. However, queuing remains
a major, albeit intermittent, component of latency. When present it
typically doubles the path delay from that due to the base speed-of-
light. Low loss is also important because, for interactive
applications, losses translate into even longer retransmission
delays.
It has been demonstrated that, once access network bit rates reach
levels now common in the developed world, increasing capacity offers
diminishing returns if latency (delay) is not addressed.
Differentiated services (Diffserv) offers Expedited Forwarding
[RFC3246] for some packets at the expense of others, but this is not
applicable when all (or most) of a user's applications require low
latency.
Therefore, the goal is an Internet service with ultra-Low queueing
Latency, ultra-Low Loss and Scalable throughput (L4S) - for _all_
traffic. A service for all traffic will need none of the
configuration or management baggage (traffic policing, traffic
contracts) associated with favouring some packets over others. This
document describes the L4S architecture for achieving that goal.
It must be said that queuing delay only degrades performance
infrequently [Hohlfeld14]. It only occurs when a large enough
capacity-seeking (e.g. TCP) flow is running alongside the user's
Briscoe, et al. Expires October 1, 2017 [Page 3]
Internet-Draft L4S Architecture March 2017
traffic in the bottleneck link, which is typically in the access
network. Or when the low latency application is itself a large
capacity-seeking flow (e.g. interactive video). At these times, the
performance improvement must be so remarkable that network operators
will be motivated to deploy it.
Active Queue Management (AQM) is part of the solution to queuing
under load. AQM improves performance for all traffic, but there is a
limit to how much queuing delay can be reduced by solely changing the
network; without addressing the root of the problem.
The root of the problem is the presence of standard TCP congestion
control (Reno [RFC5681]) or compatible variants (e.g. TCP Cubic
[I-D.ietf-tcpm-cubic]). We shall call this family of congestion
controls 'Classic' TCP. It has been demonstrated that if the sending
host replaces Classic TCP with a 'Scalable' alternative, when a
suitable AQM is deployed in the network the performance under load of
all the above interactive applications can be stunningly improved.
For instance, queuing delay under heavy load with the example DCTCP/
DualQ solution cited below is roughly 1 millisecond (1 ms) at the
99th percentile without losing link utilization. This compares with
5 to 20 ms on _average_ with a Classic TCP and current state-of-the-
art AQMs such as fq_CoDel [I-D.ietf-aqm-fq-codel] or PIE [RFC8033].
Also, with a Classic TCP, 5 ms of queuing is usually only possible by
losing some utilization.
It has been convincingly demonstrated [DCttH15] that it is possible
to deploy such an L4S service alongside the existing best efforts
service so that all of a user's applications can shift to it when
their stack is updated. Access networks are typically designed with
one link as the bottleneck for each site (which might be a home,
small enterprise or mobile device), so deployment at a single node
should give nearly all the benefit. The L4S approach requires a
number of mechanisms in different parts of the Internet to fulfill
its goal. This document presents the L4S architecture, by describing
the different components and how they interact to provide the
scalable low-latency, low-loss, Internet service.
2. L4S architecture overview
There are three main components to the L4S architecture (illustrated
in Figure 1):
1) Network: The L4S service traffic needs to be isolated from the
queuing latency of the Classic service traffic. However, the two
should be able to freely share a common pool of capacity. This is
because there is no way to predict how many flows at any one time
might use each service and capacity in access networks is too
Briscoe, et al. Expires October 1, 2017 [Page 4]
Internet-Draft L4S Architecture March 2017
scarce to partition into two. So a 'semi-permeable' membrane is
needed that partitions latency but not bandwidth. The Dual Queue
Coupled AQM [I-D.briscoe-aqm-dualq-coupled] is an example of such
a semi-permeable membrane.
Per-flow queuing such as in [I-D.ietf-aqm-fq-codel] could be used,
but it partitions both latency and bandwidth between every end-to-
end flow. So it is rather overkill, which brings disadvantages
(see Section 5.2), not least that thousands of queues are needed
when two are sufficient.
2) Protocol: A host needs to distinguish L4S and Classic packets
with an identifier so that the network can classify them into
their separate treatments. [I-D.briscoe-tsvwg-ecn-l4s-id]
considers various alternative identifiers, and concludes that all
alternatives involve compromises, but the ECT(1) codepoint of the
ECN field is a workable solution.
3) Host: Scalable congestion controls already exist. They solve the
scaling problem with TCP first pointed out in [RFC3649]. The one
used most widely (in controlled environments) is Data Centre TCP
(DCTCP [I-D.ietf-tcpm-dctcp]), which has been implemented and
deployed in Windows Server Editions (since 2012), in Linux and in
FreeBSD. Although DCTCP as-is 'works' well over the public
Internet, most implementations lack certain safety features that
will be necessary once it is used outside controlled environments
like data centres (see later). A similar scalable congestion
control will also need to be transplanted into protocols other
than TCP (SCTP, RTP/RTCP, RMCAT, etc.)
(2) (1)
.-------^------. .--------------^-------------------.
,-(3)-----. ______
; ________ : L4S --------. | |
:|Scalable| : _\ ||___\_| mark |
:| sender | : __________ / / || / |______|\ _________
:|________|\; | |/ --------' ^ \1| |
`---------'\_| IP-ECN | Coupling : \|priority |_\
________ / |Classifier| : /|scheduler| /
|Classic |/ |__________|\ --------. ___:__ / |_________|
| sender | \_\ || | |||___\_| mark/|/
|________| / || | ||| / | drop |
Classic --------' |______|
Figure 1: Components of an L4S Solution: 1) Isolation in separate
network queues; 2) Packet Identification Protocol; and 3) Scalable
Sending Host
Briscoe, et al. Expires October 1, 2017 [Page 5]
Internet-Draft L4S Architecture March 2017
3. Terminology
The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT",
"SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and "OPTIONAL" in this
document are to be interpreted as described in [RFC2119]. In this
document, these words will appear with that interpretation only when
in ALL CAPS. Lower case uses of these words are not to be
interpreted as carrying RFC-2119 significance. COMMENT: Since this
will be an information document, This should be removed.
Classic service: The 'Classic' service is intended for all the
congestion control behaviours that currently co-exist with TCP
Reno (e.g. TCP Cubic, Compound, SCTP, etc).
Low-Latency, Low-Loss and Scalable (L4S) service: The 'L4S' service
is intended for traffic from scalable TCP algorithms such as Data
Centre TCP. But it is also more general--it will allow a set of
congestion controls with similar scaling properties to DCTCP (e.g.
Relentless [Mathis09]) to evolve.
Both Classic and L4S services can cope with a proportion of
unresponsive or less-responsive traffic as well (e.g. DNS, VoIP,
etc).
Scalable Congestion Control: A congestion control where flow rate is
inversely proportional to the level of congestion signals. Then,
as flow rate scales, the number of congestion signals per round
trip remains invariant, maintaining the same degree of control.
For instance, DCTCP averages 2 congestion signals per round-trip
whatever the flow rate.
Classic Congestion Control: A congestion control with a flow rate
compatible with standard TCP Reno [RFC5681]. With Classic
congestion controls, as capacity increases enabling higher flow
rates, the number of round trips between congestion signals
(losses or ECN marks) rises in proportion to the flow rate. So
control of queuing and/or utilization becomes very slack. For
instance, with 1500 B packets and an RTT of 18 ms, as TCP Reno
flow rate increases from 2 to 100 Mb/s the number of round trips
between congestion signals rises proportionately, from 2 to 100.
The default congestion control in Linux (TCP Cubic) is Reno-
compatible for most scenarios expected for some years. For
instance, with a typical domestic round-trip time (RTT) of 18ms,
TCP Cubic only switches out of Reno-compatibility mode once the
flow rate approaches 1 Gb/s. For a typical data centre RTT of 1
ms, the switch-over point is theoretically 1.3 Tb/s. However,
with a less common transcontinental RTT of 100 ms, it only remains
Briscoe, et al. Expires October 1, 2017 [Page 6]
Internet-Draft L4S Architecture March 2017
Reno-compatible up to 13 Mb/s. All examples assume 1,500 B
packets.
Classic ECN: The original proposed standard Explicit Congestion
Notification (ECN) protocol [RFC3168], which requires ECN signals
to be treated the same as drops, both when generated in the
network and when responded to by the sender.
Site: A home, mobile device, small enterprise or campus, where the
network bottleneck is typically the access link to the site. Not
all network arrangements fit this model but it is a useful, widely
applicable generalisation.
4. L4S architecture components
The L4S architecture is composed by the following elements.
Protocols:The L4S architecture encompass the two protocol changes
that we describe next:
a. [I-D.briscoe-tsvwg-ecn-l4s-id] recommends ECT(1) is used as the
identifier to classify L4S and Classic packets into their
separate treatments, as required by [RFC4774].
b. An essential aspect of a scalable congestion control is the use
of explicit congestion signals rather than losses, because the
signals need to be sent immediately and frequently--too often to
use drops. 'Classic' ECN [RFC3168] requires an ECN signal to be
treated the same as a drop, both when it is generated in the
network and when it is responded to by hosts. L4S allows
networks and hosts to support two separate meanings for ECN. So
the standards track [RFC3168] will need to be updated to allow
ECT(1) packets to depart from the 'same as drop' constraint.
[I-D.ietf-tsvwg-ecn-experimentation] has been prepared as a
standards track update to relax specific requirements in RFC 3168
(and certain other standards track RFCs), which clears the way
for the above experimental changes proposed for L4S.
[I-D.ietf-tsvwg-ecn-experimentation] also obsoletes the original
experimental assignment of the ECT(1) codepoint as an ECN nonce
[RFC3540] (it was never deployed, and it offers no security
benefit now that deployment is optional).
Network components:The Dual Queue Coupled AQM has been specified as
generically as possible [I-D.briscoe-aqm-dualq-coupled] as a 'semi-
permeable' membrane without specifying the particular AQMs to use in
the two queues. An informational appendix of the draft is provided
for pseudocode examples of different possible AQM approaches.
Briscoe, et al. Expires October 1, 2017 [Page 7]
Internet-Draft L4S Architecture March 2017
Initially a zero-config variant of RED called Curvy RED was
implemented, tested and documented. The aim is for designers to be
free to implement diverse ideas. So the brief normative body of the
draft only specifies the minimum constraints an AQM needs to comply
with to ensure that the L4S and Classic services will coexist. For
instance, a variant of PIE called Dual PI Squared [PI2] has been
implemented and found to perform better over a wide range of
conditions, so it has been documented in a second appendix of
[I-D.briscoe-aqm-dualq-coupled].
Host mechanisms: The L4S architecture includes a number of mechanisms
in the end host that we enumerate next:
a. Data Centre TCP is the most widely used example of a scalable
congestion control. It is being documented in the TCPM WG as an
informational record of the protocol currently in use
[I-D.ietf-tcpm-dctcp]. It will be necessary to define a number
of safety features for a variant usable on the public Internet.
A draft list of these, known as the TCP Prague requirements, has
been drawn up (see Appendix A). The list also includes some
optional performance improvements.
b. Transport protocols other than TCP use various congestion
controls designed to be friendly with Classic TCP. Before they
can use the L4S service, it will be necessary to implement
scalable variants of each of these transport behaviours. The
following standards track RFCs currently define these protocols:
ECN in TCP [RFC3168], in SCTP [RFC4960], in RTP [RFC6679], and in
DCCP [RFC4340]. Not all are in widespread use, but those that
are will eventually need to be updated to allow a different
congestion response, which they will have to indicate by using
the ECT(1) codepoint. Scalable variants are under consideration
for some new transport protocols that are themselves under
development, e.g. QUIC [I-D.johansson-quic-ecn] and certain
real-time media congestion avoidandance techniques (RMCAT)
protocols.
c. ECN feedback is sufficient for L4S in some transport protocols
(RTCP, DCCP) but not others:
* For the case of TCP, the feedback protocol for ECN embeds the
assumption from Classic ECN that it is the same as drop,
making it unusable for a scalable TCP. Therefore, the
implementation of TCP receivers will have to be upgraded
[RFC7560]. Work to standardize more accurate ECN feedback for
TCP (AccECN [I-D.ietf-tcpm-accurate-ecn]) is already in
progress.
Briscoe, et al. Expires October 1, 2017 [Page 8]
Internet-Draft L4S Architecture March 2017
* ECN feedback is only roughly sketched in an appendix of the
SCTP specification. A fuller specification has been proposed
[I-D.stewart-tsvwg-sctpecn], which would need to be
implemented and deployed before SCTCP could support L4S.
5. Rationale
5.1. Why These Primary Components?
Explicit congestion signalling (protocol): Explicit congestion
signalling is a key part of the L4S approach. In contrast, use of
drop as a congestion signal creates a tension because drop is both
a useful signal (more would reduce delay) and an impairment (less
would reduce delay). Explicit congestion signals can be used many
times per round trip, to keep tight control, without any
impairment. Under heavy load, even more explicit signals can be
applied so the queue can be kept short whatever the load. Whereas
state-of-the-art AQMs have to introduce very high packet drop at
high load to keep the queue short. Further, TCP's sawtooth
reduction can be smaller, and therefore return to the operating
point more often, without worrying that this causes more signals
(one at the top of each smaller sawtooth). The consequent smaller
amplitude sawteeth fit between a very shallow marking threshold
and an empty queue, so delay variation can be very low, without
risk of under-utilization.
All the above makes it clear that explicit congestion signalling
is only advantageous for latency if it does not have to be
considered 'the same as' drop (as required with Classic ECN
[RFC3168]). Therefore, in a DualQ AQM, the L4S queue uses a new
L4S variant of ECN that is not equivalent to drop
[I-D.briscoe-tsvwg-ecn-l4s-id], while the Classic queue uses
either classic ECN [RFC3168] or drop, which are equivalent.
Before Classic ECN was standardized, there were various proposals
to give an ECN mark a different meaning from drop. However, there
was no particular reason to agree on any one of the alternative
meanings, so 'the same as drop' was the only compromise that could
be reached. RFC 3168 contains a statement that:
"An environment where all end nodes were ECN-Capable could
allow new criteria to be developed for setting the CE
codepoint, and new congestion control mechanisms for end-node
reaction to CE packets. However, this is a research issue, and
as such is not addressed in this document."
Latency isolation with coupled congestion notification (network):
Briscoe, et al. Expires October 1, 2017 [Page 9]
Internet-Draft L4S Architecture March 2017
Using just two queues is not essential to L4S (more would be
possible), but it is the simplest way to isolate all the L4S
traffic that keeps latency low from all the legacy Classic traffic
that does not.
Similarly, coupling the congestion notification between the queues
is not necessarily essential, but it is a clever and simple way to
allow senders to determine their rate, packet-by-packet, rather
than be overridden by a network scheduler. Because otherwise a
network scheduler would have to inspect at least transport layer
headers, and it would have to continually assign a rate to each
flow without any easy way to understand application intent.
L4S packet identifier (protocol): Once there are at least two
separate treatments in the network, hosts need an identifier at
the IP layer to distinguish which treatment they intend to use.
Scalable congestion notification (host): A scalable congestion
control keeps the signalling frequency high so that rate
variations can be small when signalling is stable, and rate can
track variations in available capacity as rapidly as possible
otherwise.
5.2. Why Not Alternative Approaches?
All the following approaches address some part of the same problem
space as L4S. In each case, it is shown that L4S complements them or
improves on them, rather than being a mutually exclusive alternative:
Diffserv: Diffserv addresses the problem of bandwidth apportionment
for important traffic as well as queuing latency for delay-
sensitive traffic. L4S solely addresses the problem of queuing
latency (as well as loss and throughput scaling). Diffserv will
still be necessary where important traffic requires priority (e.g.
for commercial reasons, or for protection of critical
infrastructure traffic). Nonetheless, if there are Diffserv
classes for important traffic, the L4S approach can provide low
latency for _all_ traffic within each Diffserv class (including
the case where there is only one Diffserv class).
Also, as already explained, Diffserv only works for a small subset
of the traffic on a link. It is not applicable when all the
applications in use at one time at a single site (home, small
business or mobile device) require low latency. Also, because L4S
is for all traffic, it needs none of the management baggage
(traffic policing, traffic contracts) associated with favouring
some packets over others. This baggage has held Diffserv back
from widespread end-to-end deployment.
Briscoe, et al. Expires October 1, 2017 [Page 10]
Internet-Draft L4S Architecture March 2017
State-of-the-art AQMs: AQMs such as PIE and fq_CoDel give a
significant reduction in queuing delay relative to no AQM at all.
The L4S work is intended to complement these AQMs, and we
definitely do not want to distract from the need to deploy them as
widely as possible. Nonetheless, without addressing the large
saw-toothing rate variations of Classic congestion controls, AQMs
alone cannot reduce queuing delay too far without significantly
reducing link utilization. The L4S approach resolves this tension
by ensuring hosts can minimize the size of their sawteeth without
appearing so aggressive to legacy flows that they starve.
Per-flow queuing: Similarly per-flow queuing is not incompatible
with the L4S approach. However, one queue for every flow can be
thought of as overkill compared to the minimum of two queues for
all traffic needed for the L4S approach. The overkill of per-flow
queuing has side-effects:
A. fq makes high performance networking equipment costly
(processing and memory) - in contrast dual queue code can be
very simple;
B. fq requires packet inspection into the end-to-end transport
layer, which doesn't sit well alongside encryption for privacy
- in contrast a dual queue only operates at the IP layer;
C. fq isolates the queuing of each flow from the others and it
prevents any one flow from consuming more than 1/N of the
capacity. In contrast, all L4S flows are expected to keep the
queue shallow, and policing of individual flows to enforce
this may be applied separately, as a policy choice.
An fq scheduler has to decide packet-by-packet which flow to
schedule without knowing application intent. Whereas a
separate policing function can be configured less strictly, so
that senders can still control the instantaneous rate of each
flow dependent on the needs of each application (e.g. variable
rate video), giving more wriggle-room before a flow is deemed
non-compliant. Also policing of queuing and of flow-rates can
be applied independently.
Alternative Back-off ECN (ABE): Yet again, L4S is not an alternative
to ABE but a complement that introduces much lower queuing delay.
ABE [I-D.khademi-tcpm-alternativebackoff-ecn] alters the host
behaviour in response to ECN marking to utilize a link better and
give ECN flows a faster throughput, but it assumes the network
still treats ECN and drop the same. Therefore ABE exploits any
lower queuing delay that AQMs can provide. But as explained
Briscoe, et al. Expires October 1, 2017 [Page 11]
Internet-Draft L4S Architecture March 2017
above, AQMs still cannot reduce queuing delay too far without
losing link utilization (for other non-ABE flows).
6. Applicability
A transport layer that solves the current latency issues will provide
new service, product and application opportunities.
With the L4S approach, the following existing applications will
immediately experience significantly better quality of experience
under load in the best effort class:
o Gaming
o VoIP
o Video conferencing
o Web browsing
o (Adaptive) video streaming
o Instant messaging
The significantly lower queuing latency also enables some interactive
application functions to be offloaded to the cloud that would hardly
even be usable today:
o Cloud based interactive video
o Cloud based virtual and augmented reality
The above two applications have been successfully demonstrated with
L4S, both running together over a 40 Mb/s broadband access link
loaded up with the numerous other latency sensitive applications in
the previous list as well as numerous downloads. A panoramic video
of a football stadium can be swiped and pinched so that on the fly a
proxy in the cloud generates a sub-window of the match video under
the finger-gesture control of each user. At the same time, a virtual
reality headset fed from a 360 degree camera in a racing car has been
demonstrated, where the user's head movements control the scene
generated in the cloud. In both cases, with 7 ms end-to-end base
delay, the additional queuing delay of roughly 1 ms is so low that it
seems the video is generated locally. See https://riteproject.eu/
dctth/ for videos of these demonstrations.
Using a swiping finger gesture or head movement to pan a video are
extremely demanding applications--far more demanding than VoIP.
Briscoe, et al. Expires October 1, 2017 [Page 12]
Internet-Draft L4S Architecture March 2017
Because human vision can detect extremely low delays of the order of
single milliseconds when delay is translated into a visual lag
between a video and a reference point (the finger or the orientation
of the head).
If low network delay is not available, all fine interaction has to be
done locally and therefore much more redundant data has to be
downloaded. When all interactive processing can be done in the
cloud, only the data to be rendered for the end user needs to be
sent. Whereas, once applications can rely on minimal queues in the
network, they can focus on reducing their own latency by only
minimizing the application send queue.
6.1. Use Cases
The following use-cases for L4S are being considered by various
interested parties:
o Where the bottleneck is one of various types of access network:
DSL, cable, mobile, satellite
* Radio links (cellular, WiFi) that are distant from the source
are particularly challenging. The radio link capacity can vary
rapidly by orders of magnitude, so it is often desirable to
hold a buffer to utilise sudden increases of capacity;
* cellular networks are further complicated by a perceived need
to buffer in order to make hand-overs imperceptible;
* Satellite networks generally have a very large base RTT, so
even with minimal queuing, overall delay can never be extremely
low;
* Nonetheless, it is certainly desirable not to hold a buffer
purely because of the sawteeth of Classic TCP, when it is more
than is needed for all the above reasons.
o Private networks of heterogeneous data centres, where there is no
single administrator that can arrange for all the simultaneous
changes to senders, receivers and network needed to deploy DCTCP:
* a set of private data centres interconnected over a wide area
with separate administrations, but within the same company
* a set of data centres operated by separate companies
interconnected by a community of interest network (e.g. for the
finance sector)
Briscoe, et al. Expires October 1, 2017 [Page 13]
Internet-Draft L4S Architecture March 2017
* multi-tenant (cloud) data centres where tenants choose their
operating system stack (Infrastructure as a Service - IaaS)
o Different types of transport (or application) congestion control:
* elastic (TCP/SCTP);
* real-time (RTP, RMCAT);
* query (DNS/LDAP).
o Where low delay quality of service is required, but without
inspecting or intervening above the IP layer
[I-D.you-encrypted-traffic-management]:
* mobile and other networks have tended to inspect higher layers
in order to guess application QoS requirements. However, with
growing demand for support of privacy and encryption, L4S
offers an alternative. There is no need to select which
traffic to favour for queuing, when L4S gives favourable
queuing to all traffic.
o If queuing delay is minimized, applications with a fixed delay
budget can communicate over longer distances, or via a longer
chain of service functions [RFC7665] or onion routers.
6.2. Deployment Considerations
The DualQ is, in itself, an incremental deployment framework for L4S
AQMs so that L4S traffic can coexist with existing Classic "TCP-
friendly" traffic. Section 6.2.1 explains why only deploying AQM in
one node at each end of the access link will realize nearly all the
benefit.
L4S involves both end systems and the network, so Section 6.2.2
suggests some typical sequences to deploy each part, and why there
will be an immediate and significant benefit after deploying just one
part.
If an ECN-enabled DualQ AQM has not been deployed at a bottleneck, an
L4S flow is required to include a fall-back strategy to Classic
behaviour. Section 6.2.3 describes how an L4S flow detects this, and
how to minimize the effect of false negative detection.
Briscoe, et al. Expires October 1, 2017 [Page 14]
Internet-Draft L4S Architecture March 2017
6.2.1. Deployment Topology
Nonetheless, DualQ AQMs will not have to be deployed throughout the
Internet before L4S will work for anyone. Operators of public
Internet access networks typically design their networks so that the
bottleneck will nearly always occur at one known (logical) link.
This confines the cost of queue management technology to one place.
The case of mesh networks is different and will be discussed later.
But the known bottleneck case is generally true for Internet access
to all sorts of different 'sites', where the word 'site' includes
home networks, small-to-medium sized campus or enterprise networks
and even cellular devices (Figure 2). Also, this known-bottleneck
case tends to be true whatever the access link technology; whether
xDSL, cable, cellular, line-of-sight wireless or satellite.
Therefore, the full benefit of the L4S service should be available in
the downstream direction when the DualQ AQM is deployed at the
ingress to this bottleneck link (or links for multihomed sites). And
similarly, the full upstream service will be available once the DualQ
is deployed at the upstream ingress.
______
( )
__ __ ( )
|DQ\________/DQ|( enterprise )
___ |__/ \__| ( /campus )
( ) (______)
( ) ___||_
+----+ ( ) __ __ / \
| DC |-----( Core )|DQ\_______________/DQ|| home |
+----+ ( ) |__/ \__||______|
(_____) __
|DQ\__/\ __ ,===.
|__/ \ ____/DQ||| ||mobile
\/ \__|||_||device
| o |
`---'
Figure 2: Likely location of DualQ Deployments in common access
topologies
Deployment in mesh topologies depends on how over-booked the core is.
If the core is non-blocking, or at least generously provisioned so
that the edges are nearly always the bottlenecks, it would only be
necessary to deploy the DualQ AQM at the edge bottlenecks. For
example, some datacentre networks are designed with the bottleneck in
Briscoe, et al. Expires October 1, 2017 [Page 15]
Internet-Draft L4S Architecture March 2017
the hypervisor or host NICs, while others bottleneck at the top-of-
rack switch (both the output ports facing hosts and those facing the
core).
The DualQ would eventually also need to be deployed at any other
persistent bottlenecks such as network interconnections, e.g. some
public Internet exchange points and the ingress and egress to WAN
links interconnecting datacentres.
6.2.2. Deployment Sequences
For any one L4S flow to work, it requires 3 parts to have been
deployed. This was the same deployment problem that ECN faced
[I-D.iab-protocol-transitions] so we have learned from this.
FIrstly, L4S deployment exploits the fact that DCTCP already exists
on many Internet hosts (Windows, FreeBSD and Linux); both servers and
clients. Therefore, just deploying DualQ AQM at a network bottleneck
immediately gives a working deployment of all the L4S parts. DCTCP
needs some safety concerns to be fixed for general use over the
public Internet (see Appendix A), but DCTCP is not on by default, so
these issues can be managed within controlled deployments or
controlled trials.
Secondly, the performance improvement with L4S is so significant that
it enables new interactive services and products that were not
previously possible. It is much easier for companies to initiate new
work on deployment if there is budget for a new product trial. If,
in contrast, there were only an incremental performance improvement
(as with Classic ECN), spending on deployment tends to be much harder
to justify.
Thirdly, the L4S identifier is defined so that intially network
operators can enable L4S exclusively for certain customers or certain
applications. But this is carefully defined so that it does not
compromise future evolution towards L4S as an Internet-wide service.
This is because the L4S identifier is defined not only as the end-to-
end ECN field, but it can also optionally be combined with any other
packet header or some status of a customer or their access link.
Operators could do this anyway, even if it were not blessed by the
IETF. However, it is best for the IETF to specify that they must use
their own local identifier in combination with the IETF's identifier.
Then, if an operator enables the optional local-use approach, they
only have to remove this extra rule to make the service work
Internet-wide - it will already traverse middleboxes, peerings, etc.
Briscoe, et al. Expires October 1, 2017 [Page 16]
Internet-Draft L4S Architecture March 2017
+-+--------------------+----------------------+---------------------+
| | Servers or proxies | Access link | Clients |
+-+--------------------+----------------------+---------------------+
|1| DCTCP (existing) | | DCTCP (existing) |
| | | DualQ AQM downstream | |
| | WORKS DOWNSTREAM FOR CONTROLLED DEPLOYMENTS/TRIALS |
+-+--------------------+----------------------+---------------------+
|2| TCP Prague | | AccECN (already in |
| | | | progress:DCTCP/BBR) |
| | FULLY WORKS DOWNSTREAM |
+-+--------------------+----------------------+---------------------+
|3| | DualQ AQM upstream | TCP Prague |
| | | | |
| | FULLY WORKS UPSTREAM AND DOWNSTREAM |
+-+--------------------+----------------------+---------------------+
Figure 3: Example L4S Deployment Sequences
Figure 3 illustrates some example sequences in which the parts of L4S
might be deployed. It consists of the following stages:
1. Here, the immediate benefit of a single AQM deployment can be
seen, but limited to a controlled trial or controlled deployment.
In this example downstream deployment is first, but in other
scenarios the upstream might be go first. The DualQ AQM also
greatly improves the downstream Classic service, assuming no
other AQM has already been deployed.
2. In this stage, the name 'TCP Prague' is used to represent a
variant of DCTCP that is safe to use in a production environment.
If the application is primarily unidirectional, 'TCP Prague' is
only needed at one end. Accurate ECN feedback (AccECN)
[I-D.ietf-tcpm-accurate-ecn] is needed at the other end, but it
is a generic ECN feedback facility that is already planned to be
deployed for other purposes, e.g. DCTCP, BBR [BBR]. The two
ends can be deployed in either order, because TCP Prague only
enables itself if it has negotiated the use of AccECN feedback
with the other end during the connection handshake. Thus,
deployment on both ends (and in some cases only one) enables L4S
trials to move to a production service, in one direction. This
stage might be further motivated by performance improvements
between DCTCP and TCP Prague Appendix A.
3. This is a two-move stage to enable L4S upstream. The DualQ or
TCP Prague can be deployed in either order as already explained.
To motivate the first of two independent moves, the deferred
benefit of enabling new services after the second move has to be
Briscoe, et al. Expires October 1, 2017 [Page 17]
Internet-Draft L4S Architecture March 2017
worth it to cover the first mover's investment risk. As
explained already, the potential for new services provides this
motivation. The DualQ AQM also greatly improves the upstream
Classic service, assuming no other AQM has already been deployed.
Note that other deployment sequences might occur. For instance: the
upstream might be deployed first; a non-TCP protocol might be used
end-to-end, e.g. QUIC, RMCAT; a body such as the 3GPP might require
L4S to be implemented in 5G user equipment, or other random acts of
kindness.
6.2.3. L4S Flow but Non-L4S Bottleneck
If L4S is enabled between two hosts but there is no L4S AQM at the
bottleneck, any drop from the bottleneck will trigger the L4S sender
to fall back to a 'TCP-Friendly' behaviour (Requirement #4.1 in
Appendix A).
Unfortunately, as well as protecting legacy traffic, this rule
degrades the L4S service whenever there is a loss, even if the loss
was not from a non-DualQ bottleneck (false negative). And
unfortunately, prevalent drop can be due to other causes, e.g.:
o congestion loss at other transient bottlenecks, e.g. due to bursts
in shallower queues;
o transmission errors, e.g. due to electrical interference;
o rate policing.
Three complementary approaches are in progress, but they are all
currently research:
o In TCP Prague, use a similar approach to BBR [BBR] to ignore
selected losses. This could mask any of the above types of loss
(requires consensus on how to safely interoperate with drop-based
congestion controls).
o A combination of RACK, reconfigured link retransmission and L4S
could address transmission errors (no reference yet);
o Hybrid ECN/drop policers (see Section 8.3).
L4S deployment scenarios that minimize these issues (e.g. over
wireline networks) can proceed in parallel to this research, in the
expectation that research success will continually widen L4S
applicability.
Briscoe, et al. Expires October 1, 2017 [Page 18]
Internet-Draft L4S Architecture March 2017
In recent studies there has been no evidence of Classic ECN support
in AQMs on the Internet. If Classic ECN support does materialize, a
way to satisfy Requirement #4.2 in Appendix A will have to be added
to TCP Prague.
6.2.4. Other Potential Deployment Issues
An L4S AQM uses the ECN field to signal congestion. So, in common
with Classic ECN, if the AQM is within a tunnel or at a lower layer,
correct functioning of ECN signalling requires correct propagation of
the ECN field up the layers [I-D.ietf-tsvwg-ecn-encap-guidelines].
7. IANA Considerations
This specification contains no IANA considerations.
8. Security Considerations
8.1. Traffic (Non-)Policing
Because the L4S service can serve all traffic that is using the
capacity of a link, it should not be necessary to police access to
the L4S service. In contrast, Diffserv only works if some packets
get less favourable treatement than others. So it has to use traffic
policers to limit how much traffic can be favoured, In turn, traffic
policers require traffic contracts between users and networks as well
as pairwise between networks. Because L4S will lack all this
management complexity, it is more likely to work end-to-end.
During early deployment (and perhaps always), some networks will not
offer the L4S service. These networks do not need to police or re-
mark L4S traffic - they just forward it unchanged as best efforts
traffic, as they would already forward traffic with ECT(1) today. At
a bottleneck, such networks will introduce some queuing and dropping.
When a scalable congestion control detects a drop it will have to
respond as if it is a Classic congestion control (see item 3-1 in
Appendix A). This will ensure safe interworking with other traffic
at the 'legacy' bottleneck, but it will degrade the L4S service to no
better (but never worse) than classic best efforts, whenever a legacy
(non-L4S) bottleneck is encountered on a path.
Certain network operators might choose to restict access to the L4S
class, perhaps only to customers who have paid a premium. Their
packet classifer (item 2 in Figure 1) could identify such customers
against some other field (e.g. source address range) as well as ECN.
If only the ECN L4S identifier matched, but not the source address
(say), the classifier could direct these packets (from non-paying
customers) into the Classic queue. Allowing operators to use an
Briscoe, et al. Expires October 1, 2017 [Page 19]
Internet-Draft L4S Architecture March 2017
additional local classifier is intended to remove any incentive to
bleach the L4S identifier. Then at least the L4S ECN identifier will
be more likely to survive end-to-end even though the service may not
be supported at every hop. Such arrangements would only require
simple registered/not-registered packet classification, rather than
the managed application-specific traffic policing against customer-
specific traffic contracts that Diffserv requires.
8.2. 'Latency Friendliness'
The L4S service does rely on self-constraint - not in terms of
limiting capacity usage, but in terms of limiting burstiness. It is
hoped that standardisation of dynamic behaviour (cf. TCP slow-start)
and self-interest will be sufficient to prevent transports from
sending excessive bursts of L4S traffic, given the application's own
latency will suffer most from such behaviour.
Whether burst policing becomes necessary remains to be seen. Without
it, there will be potential for attacks on the low latency of the L4S
service. However it may only be necessary to apply such policing
reactively, e.g. punitively targeted at any deployments of new bursty
malware.
8.3. Policing Prioritized L4S Bandwidth
As mentioned in Section 5.2, L4S should remove the need for low
latency Diffserv classes. However, those Diffserv classes that give
certain applications or users priority over capacity, would still be
applicable. Then, within such Diffserv classes, L4S would often be
applicable to give traffic low latency and low loss. WIthin such a
class, the bandwidth available to a user or application is often
limited by a rate policer. Similarly, in the default Diffserv class,
rate policers are used to partition shared capacity.
A classic rate policer drops any packets exceeding a set rate,
usually also giving a burst allowance (variant exist where the
policer re-marks non-compliant traffic to a discard-eligible Diffserv
codepoint, so they may be dropped elsewhere during contention). In
networks that deploy L4S and use rate policers, it will be preferable
to deploy a policer designed to be more friendly to the L4S service,
This is currently a research area. it might be achieved by setting a
threshold where ECN marking is introduced, such that it is just under
the policed rate or just under the burst allowance where drop is
introduced. This could be applied to various types of policer, e.g.
[RFC2697], [RFC2698] or the local (non-ConEx) variant of the ConEx
congestion policer [I-D.briscoe-conex-policing]. Otherwise, whenever
L4S traffic encounters a rate policer, it will experience drops and
Briscoe, et al. Expires October 1, 2017 [Page 20]
Internet-Draft L4S Architecture March 2017
the source will fall back to a Classic congestion control, thus
losing all the benefits of L4S.
Further discussion of the applicability of L4S to the various
Diffserv classes, and the design of suitable L4S rate policers.
8.4. ECN Integrity
Receiving hosts can fool a sender into downloading faster by
suppressing feedback of ECN marks (or of losses if retransmissions
are not necessary or available otherwise). [RFC3540] proposes that a
TCP sender could pseudorandomly set either of ECT(0) or ECT(1) in
each packet of a flow and remember the sequence it had set, termed
the ECN nonce. If the receiver supports the nonce, it can prove that
it is not suppressing feedback by reflecting its knowledge of the
sequence back to the sender. The nonce was proposed on the
assumption that receivers might be more likely to cheat congestion
control than senders (although senders also have a motive to cheat).
If L4S uses the ECT(1) codepoint of ECN for packet classification, it
will have to obsolete the experimental nonce. As far as is known,
the ECN Nonce has never been deployed, and it was only implemented
for a couple of testbed evaluations. It would be nearly impossible
to deploy now, because any misbehaving receiver can simply opt-out,
which would be unremarkable given all receivers currently opt-out.
Other ways to protect TCP feedback integrity have since been
developed. For instance:
o the sender can test the integrity of the receiver's feedback by
occasionally setting the IP-ECN field to a value normally only set
by the network. Then it can test whether the receiver's feedback
faithfully reports what it expects [I-D.moncaster-tcpm-rcv-cheat].
This method consumes no extra codepoints. It works for loss and
it will work for ECN feedback in any transport protocol suitable
for L4S. However, it shares the same assumption as the nonce;
that the sender is not cheating and it is motivated to prevent the
receiver cheating;
o A network can enforce a congestion response to its ECN markings
(or packet losses) by auditing congestion exposure (ConEx)
[RFC7713]. Whether the receiver or a downstream network is
suppressing congestion feedback or the sender is unresponsive to
the feedback, or both, ConEx audit can neutralise any advantage
that any of these three parties would otherwise gain. ConEx is
only currently defined for IPv6 and consumes a destination option
header. It has been implemented, but not deployed as far as is
known.
Briscoe, et al. Expires October 1, 2017 [Page 21]
Internet-Draft L4S Architecture March 2017
9. Acknowledgements
Thanks to Wes Eddy, Karen Nielsen and David Black for their useful
review comments.
10. References
10.1. Normative References
[RFC2119] Bradner, S., "Key words for use in RFCs to Indicate
Requirement Levels", BCP 14, RFC 2119,
DOI 10.17487/RFC2119, March 1997,
.
10.2. Informative References
[Alizadeh-stability]
Alizadeh, M., Javanmard, A., and B. Prabhakar, "Analysis
of DCTCP: Stability, Convergence, and Fairness", ACM
SIGMETRICS 2011 , June 2011.
[BBR] Cardwell, N., Cheng, Y., Gunn, C., Yeganeh, S., and V.
Jacobson, "BBR: Congestion-Based Congestion Control;
Measuring bottleneck bandwidth and round-trip propagation
time", ACM Queue (14)5, December 2016.
[DCttH15] De Schepper, K., Bondarenko, O., Tsang, I., and B.
Briscoe, "'Data Centre to the Home': Ultra-Low Latency for
All", 2015, .
(Under submission)
[Hohlfeld14]
Hohlfeld , O., Pujol, E., Ciucu, F., Feldmann, A., and P.
Barford, "A QoE Perspective on Sizing Network Buffers",
Proc. ACM Internet Measurement Conf (IMC'14) hmm, November
2014.
[I-D.briscoe-aqm-dualq-coupled]
Schepper, K., Briscoe, B., Bondarenko, O., and I. Tsang,
"DualQ Coupled AQM for Low Latency, Low Loss and Scalable
Throughput", draft-briscoe-aqm-dualq-coupled-01 (work in
progress), March 2016.
Briscoe, et al. Expires October 1, 2017 [Page 22]
Internet-Draft L4S Architecture March 2017
[I-D.briscoe-conex-policing]
Briscoe, B., "Network Performance Isolation using
Congestion Policing", draft-briscoe-conex-policing-01
(work in progress), February 2014.
[I-D.briscoe-tsvwg-ecn-l4s-id]
Schepper, K., Briscoe, B., and I. Tsang, "Identifying
Modified Explicit Congestion Notification (ECN) Semantics
for Ultra-Low Queuing Delay", draft-briscoe-tsvwg-ecn-l4s-
id-02 (work in progress), October 2016.
[I-D.iab-protocol-transitions]
Thaler, D., "Planning for Protocol Adoption and Subsequent
Transitions", draft-iab-protocol-transitions-08 (work in
progress), March 2017.
[I-D.ietf-aqm-fq-codel]
Hoeiland-Joergensen, T., McKenney, P.,
dave.taht@gmail.com, d., Gettys, J., and E. Dumazet, "The
FlowQueue-CoDel Packet Scheduler and Active Queue
Management Algorithm", draft-ietf-aqm-fq-codel-06 (work in
progress), March 2016.
[I-D.ietf-tcpm-accurate-ecn]
Briscoe, B., Kuehlewind, M., and R. Scheffenegger, "More
Accurate ECN Feedback in TCP", draft-ietf-tcpm-accurate-
ecn-02 (work in progress), October 2016.
[I-D.ietf-tcpm-cubic]
Rhee, I., Xu, L., Ha, S., Zimmermann, A., Eggert, L., and
R. Scheffenegger, "CUBIC for Fast Long-Distance Networks",
draft-ietf-tcpm-cubic-04 (work in progress), February
2017.
[I-D.ietf-tcpm-dctcp]
Bensley, S., Thaler, D., Balasubramanian, P., Eggert, L.,
and G. Judd, "Datacenter TCP (DCTCP): TCP Congestion
Control for Datacenters", draft-ietf-tcpm-dctcp-05 (work
in progress), March 2017.
[I-D.ietf-tsvwg-ecn-encap-guidelines]
Briscoe, B., Kaippallimalil, J., and P. Thaler,
"Guidelines for Adding Congestion Notification to
Protocols that Encapsulate IP", draft-ietf-tsvwg-ecn-
encap-guidelines-08 (work in progress), March 2017.
Briscoe, et al. Expires October 1, 2017 [Page 23]
Internet-Draft L4S Architecture March 2017
[I-D.ietf-tsvwg-ecn-experimentation]
Black, D., "Explicit Congestion Notification (ECN)
Experimentation", draft-ietf-tsvwg-ecn-experimentation-01
(work in progress), March 2017.
[I-D.johansson-quic-ecn]
Johansson, I., "ECN support in QUIC", draft-johansson-
quic-ecn-01 (work in progress), February 2017.
[I-D.khademi-tcpm-alternativebackoff-ecn]
Khademi, N., Welzl, M., Armitage, G., and G. Fairhurst,
"TCP Alternative Backoff with ECN (ABE)", draft-khademi-
tcpm-alternativebackoff-ecn-01 (work in progress), October
2016.
[I-D.moncaster-tcpm-rcv-cheat]
Moncaster, T., Briscoe, B., and A. Jacquet, "A TCP Test to
Allow Senders to Identify Receiver Non-Compliance", draft-
moncaster-tcpm-rcv-cheat-03 (work in progress), July 2014.
[I-D.stewart-tsvwg-sctpecn]
Stewart, R., Tuexen, M., and X. Dong, "ECN for Stream
Control Transmission Protocol (SCTP)", draft-stewart-
tsvwg-sctpecn-05 (work in progress), January 2014.
[I-D.you-encrypted-traffic-management]
You, J. and C. Xiong, "The Effect of Encrypted Traffic on
the QoS Mechanisms in Cellular Networks", draft-you-
encrypted-traffic-management-00 (work in progress),
October 2015.
[Mathis09]
Mathis, M., "Relentless Congestion Control", PFLDNeT'09 ,
May 2009, .
[NewCC_Proc]
Eggert, L., "Experimental Specification of New Congestion
Control Algorithms", IETF Operational Note ion-tsv-alt-cc,
July 2007.
[PI2] De Schepper, K., Bondarenko, O., Tsang, I., and B.
Briscoe, "PI^2 : A Linearized AQM for both Classic and
Scalable TCP", Proc. ACM CoNEXT 2016 pp.105-119, December
2016,
.
Briscoe, et al. Expires October 1, 2017 [Page 24]
Internet-Draft L4S Architecture March 2017
[RFC2697] Heinanen, J. and R. Guerin, "A Single Rate Three Color
Marker", RFC 2697, DOI 10.17487/RFC2697, September 1999,
.
[RFC2698] Heinanen, J. and R. Guerin, "A Two Rate Three Color
Marker", RFC 2698, DOI 10.17487/RFC2698, September 1999,
.
[RFC3168] Ramakrishnan, K., Floyd, S., and D. Black, "The Addition
of Explicit Congestion Notification (ECN) to IP",
RFC 3168, DOI 10.17487/RFC3168, September 2001,
.
[RFC3246] Davie, B., Charny, A., Bennet, J., Benson, K., Le Boudec,
J., Courtney, W., Davari, S., Firoiu, V., and D.
Stiliadis, "An Expedited Forwarding PHB (Per-Hop
Behavior)", RFC 3246, DOI 10.17487/RFC3246, March 2002,
.
[RFC3540] Spring, N., Wetherall, D., and D. Ely, "Robust Explicit
Congestion Notification (ECN) Signaling with Nonces",
RFC 3540, DOI 10.17487/RFC3540, June 2003,
.
[RFC3649] Floyd, S., "HighSpeed TCP for Large Congestion Windows",
RFC 3649, DOI 10.17487/RFC3649, December 2003,
.
[RFC4340] Kohler, E., Handley, M., and S. Floyd, "Datagram
Congestion Control Protocol (DCCP)", RFC 4340,
DOI 10.17487/RFC4340, March 2006,
.
[RFC4774] Floyd, S., "Specifying Alternate Semantics for the
Explicit Congestion Notification (ECN) Field", BCP 124,
RFC 4774, DOI 10.17487/RFC4774, November 2006,
.
[RFC4960] Stewart, R., Ed., "Stream Control Transmission Protocol",
RFC 4960, DOI 10.17487/RFC4960, September 2007,
.
[RFC5681] Allman, M., Paxson, V., and E. Blanton, "TCP Congestion
Control", RFC 5681, DOI 10.17487/RFC5681, September 2009,
.
Briscoe, et al. Expires October 1, 2017 [Page 25]
Internet-Draft L4S Architecture March 2017
[RFC6679] Westerlund, M., Johansson, I., Perkins, C., O'Hanlon, P.,
and K. Carlberg, "Explicit Congestion Notification (ECN)
for RTP over UDP", RFC 6679, DOI 10.17487/RFC6679, August
2012, .
[RFC7560] Kuehlewind, M., Ed., Scheffenegger, R., and B. Briscoe,
"Problem Statement and Requirements for Increased Accuracy
in Explicit Congestion Notification (ECN) Feedback",
RFC 7560, DOI 10.17487/RFC7560, August 2015,
.
[RFC7665] Halpern, J., Ed. and C. Pignataro, Ed., "Service Function
Chaining (SFC) Architecture", RFC 7665,
DOI 10.17487/RFC7665, October 2015,
.
[RFC7713] Mathis, M. and B. Briscoe, "Congestion Exposure (ConEx)
Concepts, Abstract Mechanism, and Requirements", RFC 7713,
DOI 10.17487/RFC7713, December 2015,
.
[RFC8033] Pan, R., Natarajan, P., Baker, F., and G. White,
"Proportional Integral Controller Enhanced (PIE): A
Lightweight Control Scheme to Address the Bufferbloat
Problem", RFC 8033, DOI 10.17487/RFC8033, February 2017,
.
[TCP-sub-mss-w]
Briscoe, B. and K. De Schepper, "Scaling TCP's Congestion
Window for Small Round Trip Times", BT Technical Report
TR-TUB8-2015-002, May 2015,
.
[TCPPrague]
Briscoe, B., "Notes: DCTCP evolution 'bar BoF': Tue 21 Jul
2015, 17:40, Prague", tcpprague mailing list archive ,
July 2015.
Appendix A. Required features for scalable transport protocols to be
safely deployable in the Internet (a.k.a. TCP Prague
requirements)
This list contains a list of features, mechanisms and modifications
from currently defined behaviour for scalable Transport protocols so
that they can be safely deployed over the public Internet. This list
of requirements was produced at an ad hoc meeting during IETF-94 in
Prague [TCPPrague].
Briscoe, et al. Expires October 1, 2017 [Page 26]
Internet-Draft L4S Architecture March 2017
One of such scalable transport protocols is DCTCP, currently
specified in [I-D.ietf-tcpm-dctcp]. In its current form, DCTCP is
specified to be deployable in controlled environments and deploying
it in the public Internet would lead to a number of issues, both from
the safety and the performance perspective. In this section, we
describe the modifications and additional mechanisms that are
required for its deployment over the global Internet. We use DCTCP
as a base, but it is likely that most of these requirements equally
apply to other scalable transport protocols.
We next provide a brief description of each required feature.
Requirement #4.1: Fall back to Reno/Cubic congestion control on
packet loss.
Description: In case of packet loss, the scalable transport MUST
react as classic TCP (whatever the classic version of TCP is running
in the host, e.g. Reno, Cubic).
Motivation: As part of the safety conditions for deploying a scalable
transport over the public Internet is to make sure that it behaves
properly when some or all the network devices connecting the two
endpoints that implement the scalable transport have not been
upgraded. In particular, it may be the case that some of the
switches along the path between the two endpoints may only react to
congestion by dropping packets (i.e. no ECN marking). It is
important that in these cases, the scalable transport react to the
congestion signal in the form of a packet drop similarly to classic
TCP.
In the particular case of DCTCP, the current DCTCP specification
states that "It is RECOMMENDED that an implementation deal with loss
episodes in the same way as conventional TCP." For safe deployment
in the public Internet of a scalable transport, the above requirement
needs to be defined as a MUST.
Packet loss, while rare, may also occur in the case that the
bottleneck is L4S capable. In this case, the sender may receive a
high number of packets marked with the CE bit set and also experience
a loss. Current DCTCP implementations react differently to this
situation. At least one implementation reacts only to the drop
signal (e.g. by halving the CWND) and at least another DCTCP
implementation reacts to both signals (e.g. by halving the CWND due
to the drop and also further reducing the CWND based on the
proportion of marked packet). We believe that further
experimentation is needed to understand what is the best behaviour
for the public Internet, which may or not be one of the existent
implementations.
Briscoe, et al. Expires October 1, 2017 [Page 27]
Internet-Draft L4S Architecture March 2017
Requirement #4.2: Fall back to Reno/Cubic congestion control on
classic ECN bottlenecks.
Description: The scalable transport protocol SHOULD/MAY? behave as
classic TCP with classic ECN if the path contains a legacy bottleneck
which marks both ect(0) and ect(1) in the same way as drop (non L4S,
but ECN capable bottleneck).
Motivation: Similarly to Requirement #3.1, this requirement is a
safety condition in case L4S-capable endpoints are communicating over
a path that contains one or more non-L4S but ECN capable switches and
one of them happens to be the bottleneck. In this case, the scalable
transport will attempt to fill in the buffer of the bottleneck switch
up to the marking threshold and produce a small sawtooth around that
operation point. The result is that the switch will set its
operation point with the buffer full and all other non-scalable
transports will be starved (as they will react reducing their CWND
more aggressively than the scalable transport).
Scalable transports then MUST be able to detect the presence of a
classic ECN bottleneck and fall back to classic TCP/classic ECN
behaviour in this case.
Discussion: It is not clear at this point if it is possible to design
a mechanism that always detect the aforementioned cases. One
possibility is to base the detection on an increase on top of a
minimum RTT, but it is not yet clear which value should trigger this.
Having a delay based fall back response on L4S may as well be
beneficial for preserving low latency without legacy network nodes.
Even if it possible to design such a mechanism, it may well be that
it would encompass additional complexity that implementers may
consider unnecessary. The need for this mechanism depends on the
extent of classic ECN deployment.
Requirement #4.3: Reduce RTT dependence
Description: Scalable transport congestion control algorithms MUST
reduce or eliminate the RTT bias within the range of RTTs available.
Motivation: Classic TCP's throughput is known to be inversely
proportional to RTT. One would expect flows over very low RTT paths
to nearly starve flows over larger RTTs. However, because Classic
TCP induces a large queue, it has never allowed a very low RTT path
to exist, so far. For instance, consider two paths with base RTT 1ms
and 100ms. If Classic TCP induces a 20ms queue, it turns these RTTs
into 21ms and 120ms leading to a throughput ratio of about 1:6.
Whereas if a Scalable TCP induces only a 1ms queue, the ratio is
Briscoe, et al. Expires October 1, 2017 [Page 28]
Internet-Draft L4S Architecture March 2017
2:101. Therefore, with small queues, long RTT flows will essentially
starve.
Scalable transport protocol MUST then accommodate flows across the
range of RTTs enabled by the deployment of L4S service over the
public Internet.
Requirement #4.4: Scaling down the congestion window.
Description: Scalable transports MUST be responsive to congestion
when RTTs are significantly smaller than in the current public
Internet.
Motivation: As currently specified, the minimum CWND of TCP (and the
scalable extensions such as DCTCP), is set to 2 MSS. Once this
minimum CWND is reached, the transport protocol ceases to react to
congestion signals (the CWND is not further reduced beyond this
minimum size).
L4S mechanisms reduce significantly the queueing delay, achieving
smaller RTTs over the Internet. For the same CWND, smaller RTTs
imply higher transmission rates. The result is that when scalable
transport are used and small RTTs are achieved, the minimum value of
the CWND currently defined in 2 MSS may still result in a high
transmission rate for a large number of common scenarios. For
example, as described in [TCP-sub-mss-w], consider a residential
setting with an broadband Internet access of 40Mbps. Suppose now a
number of equal TCP flows running in parallel with the Internet
access link being the bottleneck. Suppose that for these flows, the
RTT is 6ms and the MSS is 1500B. The minimum transmission rate
supported by TCP in this scenario is when CWND is set to 2 MSS, which
results in 4Mbps for each flow. This means that in this scenario, if
the number of flows is higher than 10, the congestion control ceases
to be responsive and starts to build up a queue in the network.
In order to address this issue, the congestion control mechanism for
scalable transports MUST be responsive for the new range of RTT
resulting from the decrease of the queueing delay.
There are several ways how this can be achieved. One possible sub-
MSS window mechanism is described in [TCP-sub-mss-w].
In addition to the safety requirements described before, there are
some optimizations that while not required for the safe deployment of
scalable transports over the public Internet, would results in an
optimized performance. We describe them next.
Optimization #5.1: Setting ECT in SYN, SYN/ACK and pure ACK packets.
Briscoe, et al. Expires October 1, 2017 [Page 29]
Internet-Draft L4S Architecture March 2017
Description: Scalable transport SHOULD set the ECT bit in SYN, SYN/
ACK and pure ACK packets.
Motivation: Failing to set the ECT bit in SYN, SYN/ACK or ACK packets
results in these packets being more likely dropped during congestion
events. Dropping SYN and SYN/ACK packets is particularly bad for
performance as the retransmission timers for these packets are large.
[RFC3168] prevents from marking these packets due to security
reasons. The arguments provided should be revisited in the the
context of L4S and evaluate if avoiding marking these packets is
still the best approach.
Optimization #5.2: Faster than additive increase.
Description: Scalable transport MAY support faster than additive
increase in the congestion avoidance phase.
Motivation: As currently defined, DCTCP supports additive increase in
congestion avoidance phase. It would be beneficial for performance
to update the congestion control algorithm to increase the CWND more
than 1 MSS per RTT during the congestion avoidance phase. In the
context of L4S such mechanism, must also provide fairness with other
classes of traffic, including classic TCP and possibly scalable TCP
that uses additive increase.
Optimization #5.3: Faster convergence to fairness.
Description: Scalable transport SHOULD converge to a fair share
allocation of the available capacity as fast as classic TCP or
faster.
Motivation: The time required for a new flow to obtain its fair share
of the capacity of the bottleneck when the there are already ongoing
flows using up all the bottleneck capacity is higher in the case of
DCTCP than in the case of classic TCP (about a factor of 1,5 and 2
larger according to [Alizadeh-stability]). This is detrimental in
general, but it is very harmful for short flows, which performance
can be worse than the one obtained with classic TCP. for this reason
it is desirable that scalable transport provide convergence times no
larger than classic TCP.
Appendix B. Standardization items
The following table includes all the itmes that should be
standardized to provide a full L4S architecture.
Briscoe, et al. Expires October 1, 2017 [Page 30]
Internet-Draft L4S Architecture March 2017
The table is too wide for the ASCII draft format, so it has been
split into two, with a common column of row index numbers on the
left.
The columns in the second part of the table have the following
meanings:
WG: The IETF WG most relevant to this requirement. The "tcpm/iccrg"
combination refers to the procedure typically used for congestion
control changes, where tcpm owns the approval decision, but uses
the iccrg for expert review [NewCC_Proc];
TCP: Applicable to all forms of TCP congestion control;
DCTCP: Applicable to Data Centre TCP as currently used (in
controlled environments);
DCTCP bis: Applicable to an future Data Centre TCP congestion
control intended for controlled environments;
XXX Prague: Applicable to a Scalable variant of XXX (TCP/SCTP/RMCAT)
congestion control.
Briscoe, et al. Expires October 1, 2017 [Page 31]
Internet-Draft L4S Architecture March 2017
+-----+-----------------------+-------------------------------------+
| Req | Requirement | Reference |
| # | | |
+-----+-----------------------+-------------------------------------+
| 0 | ARCHITECTURE | |
| 1 | L4S IDENTIFIER | [I-D.briscoe-tsvwg-ecn-l4s-id] |
| 2 | DUAL QUEUE AQM | [I-D.briscoe-aqm-dualq-coupled] |
| 3 | Suitable ECN Feedback | [I-D.ietf-tcpm-accurate-ecn], |
| | | [I-D.stewart-tsvwg-sctpecn]. |
| | | |
| | SCALABLE TRANSPORT - | |
| | SAFETY ADDITIONS | |
| 4-1 | Fall back to | [I-D.ietf-tcpm-dctcp] |
| | Reno/Cubic on loss | |
| 4-2 | Fall back to | |
| | Reno/Cubic if classic | |
| | ECN bottleneck | |
| | detected | |
| | | |
| 4-3 | Reduce RTT-dependence | |
| | | |
| 4-4 | Scaling TCP's | [TCP-sub-mss-w] |
| | Congestion Window for | |
| | Small Round Trip | |
| | Times | |
| | SCALABLE TRANSPORT - | |
| | PERFORMANCE | |
| | ENHANCEMENTS | |
| 5-1 | Setting ECT in SYN, | draft-bagnulo-tsvwg-generalized-ECN |
| | SYN/ACK and pure ACK | |
| | packets | |
| 5-2 | Faster-than-additive | |
| | increase | |
| 5-3 | Less drastic exit | |
| | from slow-start | |
+-----+-----------------------+-------------------------------------+
Briscoe, et al. Expires October 1, 2017 [Page 32]
Internet-Draft L4S Architecture March 2017
+-----+--------+-----+-------+-----------+--------+--------+--------+
| # | WG | TCP | DCTCP | DCTCP-bis | TCP | SCTP | RMCAT |
| | | | | | Prague | Prague | Prague |
+-----+--------+-----+-------+-----------+--------+--------+--------+
| 0 | tsvwg? | Y | Y | Y | Y | Y | Y |
| 1 | tsvwg? | | | Y | Y | Y | Y |
| 2 | aqm? | n/a | n/a | n/a | n/a | n/a | n/a |
| | | | | | | | |
| | | | | | | | |
| | | | | | | | |
| 3 | tcpm | Y | Y | Y | Y | n/a | n/a |
| | | | | | | | |
| 4-1 | tcpm | | Y | Y | Y | Y | Y |
| | | | | | | | |
| 4-2 | tcpm/ | | | | Y | Y | ? |
| | iccrg? | | | | | | |
| | | | | | | | |
| | | | | | | | |
| | | | | | | | |
| | | | | | | | |
| 4-3 | tcpm/ | | | Y | Y | Y | ? |
| | iccrg? | | | | | | |
| 4-4 | tcpm | Y | Y | Y | Y | Y | ? |
| | | | | | | | |
| | | | | | | | |
| 5-1 | tsvwg | Y | Y | Y | Y | n/a | n/a |
| | | | | | | | |
| 5-2 | tcpm/ | | | Y | Y | Y | ? |
| | iccrg? | | | | | | |
| 5-3 | tcpm/ | | | Y | Y | Y | ? |
| | iccrg? | | | | | | |
+-----+--------+-----+-------+-----------+--------+--------+--------+
Authors' Addresses
Bob Briscoe (editor)
Simula Research Lab
Email: ietf@bobbriscoe.net
URI: http://bobbriscoe.net/
Briscoe, et al. Expires October 1, 2017 [Page 33]
Internet-Draft L4S Architecture March 2017
Koen De Schepper
Nokia Bell Labs
Antwerp
Belgium
Email: koen.de_schepper@nokia.com
URI: https://www.bell-labs.com/usr/koen.de_schepper
Marcelo Bagnulo
Universidad Carlos III de Madrid
Av. Universidad 30
Leganes, Madrid 28911
Spain
Phone: 34 91 6249500
Email: marcelo@it.uc3m.es
URI: http://www.it.uc3m.es
Briscoe, et al. Expires October 1, 2017 [Page 34]